Copyright for researchers

Consider your options before submitting your work to a publisher. How you manage your copyright now could impact on future uses of your work.

In order to be able to re-use and distribute your work as you wish consider retaining the ownership of the copyright to your own work.

Think before you sign away your copyright

Retaining your copyright is important to both you and the University.

You should carefully review any documents which you are asked to sign by a publisher to check whether they are compatible with deposit in ERA or with other future use of your work.

Retaining copyright of your work

If you wish to retain the right to post your articles online we recommend that you use the University of Edinburgh Copyright Agreement Amendment. This contains a paragraph which states that the publisher is being granted by you a non-exclusive licence to publish your article.

Please give any feedback that you receive from the publisher by contacting us at the link below.

Further information on copyright and Open Access

Sherpa RoMEO Project

The RoMEO project provides a searchable database of publishers' copyright and self-archiving policies for pre-prints and post-prints. Use RoMEO to find out if your publishers' copyright rules allow you to deposit in PURE, the Publications Repository & Edinburgh Research Archive.

RoMEO summarizes publishers' conditions and categorizes publishers by colours, indicating level of author rights also showing which publishers' comply with funding agencies' conditions on open access.

The University of Edinburgh

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granted degree awarding powers.